1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and products for displaying available menu choices in a multimodal browser.
2. Description of Related Art
User interaction with applications running on small devices through a keyboard or stylus has become increasingly limited and cumbersome as those devices have become increasingly smaller. In particular, small handheld devices like mobile phones and PDAs serve many functions and contain sufficient processing power to support user interaction through other modes, such as multimodal access. Devices which support multimodal access combine multiple user input modes or channels in the same interaction allowing a user to interact with the applications on the device simultaneously through multiple input modes or channels. The methods of input include speech recognition, keyboard, touch screen, stylus, mouse, handwriting, and others. Multimodal input often makes using a small device easier.
Multimodal applications often run on servers that serve up multimodal web pages for display on a multimodal browser. A ‘multimodal browser,’ as the term is used in this specification, generally means a web browser capable of receiving multimodal input and interacting with users with multimodal output. Multimodal browsers typically render web pages written in XHTML+Voice (X+V).
X+V provides a markup language that enables users to interact with an multimodal application often running on a server through spoken dialog in addition to traditional means of input such as keyboard strokes and mouse pointer action. X+V adds spoken interaction to standard web content by integrating XHTML (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) and speech recognition vocabularies supported by Voice XML. For visual markup, X+V includes the XHTML standard. For voice markup, X+V includes a subset of VoiceXML. For synchronizing the VoiceXML elements with corresponding visual interface elements, X+V uses events. XHTML includes voice modules that support speech synthesis, speech dialogs, command and control, and speech grammars. Voice handlers can be attached to XHTML elements and respond to specific events. Voice interaction features are integrated with XHTML and can consequently be used directly within XHTML content.
JavaServer Pages (JSP) currently provides a platform-independent, server-side technology for dynamically generating XML and HTML content. Current JSP technologies have not been applied to the creation of multimodal web pages however. The additional speech input and output modes of X+V applications require additional interactions between data and visual elements resulting in a more complex structure than that of the typical XML or HTML page. There is therefore an ongoing need for dynamically creating multimodal markup documents.